HATER OF GERMANS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 256, 27 September 1945, Page 6

HATER OF GERMANS

...3.45 P.M. EDITION

CAPTAIN UPHAM’S REPUTATION

RISE TO FAME.

(N.Z. Press Association.— Copyright.) " (Official News Service.) (Rec. -1.30 p.m.) LONDON, Sept. 26. Mr Robin Miller, former official war correspondent with the New Zealand Division, in a tribute to Captain Charles Upham, to whom a Bar to the V.C. has been awarded, says: Captain Uphain always knew what he wanted. He is a man of independent ideas and once he forms an opinion on anything he sticks by it doggedly, almost dogmatically.

The Germans, when they had their hands on him, came to know him not merely as a German-hater, but as an incorrigible one, and were finally obliged to lock him away in their medieval castle prison at Colditz. When the war came he enlisted at once for- overseas service, but, tor ail anyone could know then, he was just another one of thousands who came stiSaming in from the back country ruijs and the green dairy valleys, the suburban streets and the city iaetories and offices all over New Zealand to join the Expeditionary Force. Nobody in,' the 20th Infantry Battalion, to which he was posted, had any great reason at first to take particular notice of 'him. . Upham was keen and eager to learn things on which he could frame his own ideas about warfare, and a good mixer who took his fun with the lest. But his own brand of rugged individualism , soon began to assert itself. By the time he had reached Egypt he knew enough about military science to have formed certain unshakable theories of his own, and whenever they clashed with the doctrines of the instructors and the text-books he fought for them without compromise. He all but railed in ins nnal tests at O.C.T.U.—failed them, that is, in the sense that his answers to the examinations did not tally with the text-books. Barely scraping through, he‘passed out at the bottom of Ins course into the pool of newiy-fledged second-lieutenants waiting to be posted to units. On the score of his test mar us alone he might easily have been lelt kicking his heels in the base; but Major-General (then Colonel) Kippenberger was still watching lnm. He knew Upham’s capacity far better than anyone else might have judged from his O.C.T.U. marks and he wanted him back in the battalion; but he <lid' not let it seem too obvious. SICKNESS DEFIED.

Upham thus journeyed with us to Greece with the newly-acquired responsibility of a platoon commander, infantry* fighting there was rare and he and- his men were nov favoured by opportunity. He took with him to Crete the' beginnings of a severe case of dysentery which was to wrack his body throughout the bitter island campaign, but! he 1 refused point-blank to retire to hospital. Week after week he was a sick man; day after day his body grew thinner. He eouid barely look at the- bully beef and biscuits that were our? staple diet, and liis men fed him with tinned milk whenever they could find' it. He was a living skeleton by the time the fighting ended—sick, wounded and bruised. Yet, rememberin''' that,- think back on the things he*' did on Crete, the feats that made his .citation for the Victoria Cross one of the most extraordinary on record ; how he led his platoon from one enemy strong-point to another in the yard-by-vard counter-attack on the Maleme airfield; how he reached into liis tunic for a fresh grenade, crawled up to the German posts and blew them to pieces ; how he helped to carry the wounded out and lead an isolated company to safety ; and later in the fighting rerteat from Galatos, how, though twice wounded, he took his tiny platoon into the fierce battle against an overwhelming force; and how, lame, exhausted and more sick than ever, he was still fighting on his very last day on Crete, hounding a German patrol from cover, killing a score of them with a Bren gun and scattering the others in panic. The day after that on a destroyer speeding back to Alexandria I talked with him for half an hour. Not a word did he breathe of his own adventures. Nor was I ever to hear him elaborate on them once they were known. But Colonel Kippenberger soon knew enough from what the men told him to be certain that Upham had earned some kind of medal. And he gradually pieced the story together, clieqked it and counter-checked it and put* it down on paper. He found he was compiling a citation which seemed to deserve a medal for every paragraph: And so, months later, when we Jvere in the Western Desert again, it was announced that the King had been pleased to award the Victoria Cross to 2nd-Lieutenant Charles Hazlitt (Upham. The announcement spoke incidentally, of his outstanding leaderhis utter indifference to danger and, of all things, his tactical skill. Shades of those low examination marks!

HONOUR HELD IN TRUST.

Upham took the news like a staggering blow. He was angry and sullen in turn. He hid himself away from the war correspondents and photographers who rushed to find him. ' 1 remember him saying he did not want the award, that it was not rightly his. When at last he was reconciled to it I knew he was holding it in trust, as it were, for all the men who had fought beside him. -Many more battles lay ahead of Charles Upham, V.C., and the New Zealand Division. But I remember when we drove into Libya in the offensive of November, 1941, Colonel Kippenberger telling me he had left ■Upham behind with the battalion reserve. Colonel Kippenberger said he had a feeling that Upham would be killed.' Upham—well, he was disgusted. But he went back into action'. at Manquar Qaim —that bizarre desert foothold on to which the Division was thrown to check Eommel’s drive on Alexandria and from which it broke out at bayonet point. The men around him said afterwards that Upham had been simply magnificent there and. deserved anothei Victoria Cross. They were saying it again a few months later after that bloody battle on Ruweisat Ridge, but this time they were saying it with an undertone of dread, for out of the battle had come that kind of news that strikes you with the chill feeling of having known somehow that it was going to happen. Upham was reported missing. And I remember saying to myself, “Charlie is dead. There car. be no other way for a man like him to be missing,” and I thought to myself how magnificent, how terrible he must have been at the end. Ilut today it is there for all the world to read that Upham was alive, so close i hough he must have been to death. He had fought until he dropped, bleeding and exhausted. He recovered in enemy hands to become famous and notorious throughout the stalags of the German Reich: famous among the British prisoners of war for his endless attempts to escape, notorious among the Nazis as an incorrigible hater of their kind, and finally thrown into the prison they reserved for .men of his calibre. He rarely gives voice to his deepest thoughts, hut the best of his beliefs lie expresses in his own actions and the finest one of them all is that which would c a y, “A soldier’s work is never done.”